Quotes from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.

Imagination is built upon knowledge.

It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.

The great law of denial belongs to the powerful forces of life, whether the case be one of coolish baked beans, or an unrequited affection.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

What an immense power over life is the power of possessing distinct aims.

What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.

Life is moral responsibility.

Sweetest the strain when in the song The singer has been lost.

Truth, like climate, is common property.

A perfect marriage is like a pure heart ... those who have it are fit to see God.

A literary woman's best critic is her husband.

Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful, the formation of fixed habits of work.

A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.

... to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a goodblacksmith more than a lady of leisure.

It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress.

Death is not the worst sorrow.